If you are new to my blog, this is where you want to start!
Technically, I started this blog years ago. It has morphed a little in that time, but I have never done anything more than the About Me page with it until now.
I have been having a bit of an internal struggle lately. For the last couple of years, I have been enjoying social media less and less, primarily Facebook. I found a lot of enjoyment in sharing things through Instagram stories. I loved the spontaneity of it, sharing captured moments of real life. Not a well thought out post with a purpose, but just sharing me.
Last week I had finally had my fill and I started venturing out into my app store to find alternatives to Facebook and Instagram. While I have found a few, none of them are as big or let me do what those two allow me to do, keep in contact with real-life friends and family. But I can’t stand Zuckerberg and I want to contribute as little as possible to his wallet, so enter this blog.
You’ll find this blog is pretty simple. It isn’t shiny and polished and I am sure my pictures will suck because I am one of the worst photographers to ever live and I have zero patience or time for editing. But I don’t use filters or edit my photos on social media either, so I guess if you followed me on those platforms, you’ll find more of the same.
I turned 40 this past summer and have found some new hobbies. The timing was actually pretty crazy, like four or five months before the lockdown, I discovered The Food Nanny, MIGardener, and Self Sufficient Me and I became completely OBSESSED with, bread making (really making just about everything from scratch) and growing our own food. I have wanted to have our own milk cow and chickens for years, but I had never really gotten into gardening. In fact, most plants that have entered this home have died fairly fast deaths.
So like I said the timing was crazy with everything that is going on right now. But another development as a result of everything shutting down was my husband was furloughed almost immediately. He was in entertainment, primarily concert touring, and they were the first to go and will probably be the last to come back.
This means that for the last 9 months, my husband has been Mr. Mom, taking care of our daughter, doing her schooling with her, getting projects done around the house, and before she broke her hip on Christmas Eve, taking care of my now 92-year-old grandmother who lives with us. This has given me time to devote to building up our 21-year-old company, in fact in 2020 we increased our total revenue by over 6800%.
My idea and this may change down the road, is to have a personal category, a gardening category, a cooking category, and a business category, along with a list of my favorite things. I will read up later to see if I need a proper disclaimer. I don’t really see this blog bringing in loads of traffic seeing it isn’t narrowed down to a single niche and doesn’t follow MOST of the guidelines for a successful blog, but that isn’t my primary goal. But for right now yes, I might get a kickback or referral credit if you do end up using a link of mine to make a purchase.
I will be leaving my Social Media sites active, but I don’t know how often or even how much longer I will be using them. The best way to reach me is through the comments section on posts, or using the Contact Me tab above. Of course if you are a real life friend, a text, phone call, or video chat is always welcome!
I may swear in posts and if I do share a video or audio that contains adult language, there will be a warning in case you have little ears around.
As for me, if you don’t know anything about me, I will try and keep it short and sweet to wrap this up. I was born and raised in Southern California for most of my life, minus the two and a half years I lived in Connecticut. I bought my first home in Las Vegas, NV in 2001 and up until 2015, that was our home base. Currently, because of my grandmother’s health (I am sure I will do a Molly post at some point), we are living with our dogs and 5-year-old daughter in Encino, CA.
My husband, Justin, and I met when I was 16 and he was 21. We have had some rough patches and grown a lot together, and apart, over the years, but we are both better people for it and I can’t imagine having a better father for my daughter or a better match for me.
I spend my days dividing my time between running our family corporation as it’s CEO, growing food in our backyard, and cooking for my family, along with fighting to get my grandmother her health care benefits, trying to find a location to build our forever home, watching my Detroit Red Wings suck and my Vegas Golden Knights not always suck, and trying to find systems and products to streamline things in my life to squeeze as much juice as I can from my time here.
My hobbies and interests include reading (fiction and non-fiction), running, doing jigsaw puzzles, playing Castlevania Symphony of the Dark on my pink PS2, watching all 12 seasons of “Murder, She Wrote” on repeat, cooking, growing food for my family, organizing, I love old radio shows and black and white movies, my favorite station to listen to is “Billie Holiday Radio on Pandora”, I love horror movies and Scooby-Doo, and I am sure I will end up mentioning more as time goes on. As I said, this is not a niche blog.
But if you are only interested in gardening, you don’t have to worry about scrolling through posts on cooking or why Jeff Blashill needs to be fired. You can use the navigation tabs up top to jump to why you are here. I also promise to not make you scroll down an entire page to see a recipe, I will put that recipe link at the top of the post and THEN tell you its life story.
Quoting one of my favorite movies, “To make a long story short. Too late.”, welcome to my blog, which I am really going to use more like an online journal and will probably only be read by my family, friends, and a handful of people that randomly find me.
Who is cool enough to know what movie that quote is from?
